


Your Heart is an Empty Room

by messageredacted



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-14
Updated: 2012-01-14
Packaged: 2017-10-29 13:19:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/320339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s ironic that the one thing that Sherlock can’t see is the one thing that is so obvious it hurts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Your Heart is an Empty Room

**Author's Note:**

> Written for thegameison_sh prompt: Love
> 
> Originally written on 28 February 2011.

When Molly brings him a coffee, she sucks on her finger and draws a heart on the side of the cup in her own saliva and waits for it to dry invisible before she gives it to him. Sherlock doesn’t even take a second glance at the cup, but she knows that the heart is right there under his fingers, and it makes her smile.

It’s ironic that the one thing that Sherlock can’t see is the one thing that is so obvious it hurts. Molly loves him more than she’s ever loved anything else in the world, and everyone knows it except him. She has tried being obvious. She has tried things that any sane man would be able to understand. But Sherlock’s one great flaw is that he wouldn’t know human emotion if it slapped him in the face, and maybe Molly loves that about him a little bit too.

Sherlock is anything but predictable, but Molly knows the few habits he has, and when she has time, she spends hours in his favorite coffee shop, hoping to run into him by happy coincidence. She lurks in the aisles of the Tesco closest to his flat, staring at the products and trying to guess which one he uses.

She runs into John one afternoon, buying a few things for the flat. When he leaves, Molly buys everything that John did, including a bottle of shampoo. When she goes back to her own flat and opens the shampoo, it smells like Sherlock. She showers with it, rubbing it all over her body.

Maybe the next time she sees Sherlock and he doesn’t notice that she’s there, it will be because she smells so much like Sherlock that she could be his own shadow.

His coat is heavy and swirly and gorgeous. He leaves it on a hook and when he isn’t around Molly tries it on, twirling to let it flare out. It wraps around her like a hug. Molly picks at the seam of the lining until a tiny section of it comes away from the fabric of the coat just at the neck. She clips a lock of her hair and winds it around her finger, then pokes it into the lining of the coat. She sews the lining back in place again with a single stitch, then hangs it on the hook again.

Sherlock spends nearly a week in St. Bart’s, investigating a case. A few new corpses arrive and Molly is able to hover nearby while Sherlock examines them thoroughly. His long fingers run over skin that she touched just minutes ago. She imagines that his fingers are soaking in the tiny warmth that her hands left on the corpse. He will never touch her the way he touches that corpse, but she is okay with that. She imagines that the corpse is a glove, the only thing separating his flesh from hers.

A few nights later, she finds him sitting in the lab, his head pillowed in his arms, sound asleep. By her calculations, he’s been awake for fifty-two hours now, so this is good for him. She’s careful not to wake him as she leans over his shoulder and lets her breath gust across his cheek. The moisture from her lungs settles on his skin, an invisible kiss. Later, when he wakes, he won’t even know it’s there.

But she will.


End file.
